What makes people resend healthy food messages online: The effects of message cues

In recent years, more people are aware that unhealthy food have played a central role in the etiology of diseases and obesity. Healthy food therefore has becoming a trending topic. In the Health 2.0 environment, anyone can post healthy food messages online, which are considered as “collective intelligence” or the “wisdom of crowds”. Such intelligence or wisdom can reach millions of people and influence their lifestyles if message receivers resend them on social media. In this paper, we seek to reveal mechanisms for public health officials or health care providers to promote the dissemination of healthy food messages online. Different from other messages, healthy food messages are difficult to be verified; therefore, we refer to rumor theory as our theoretical foundation. Based on rumor theory, we build a model to explain the message cues that motivate message receivers to resend healthy food messages on social media. We tested our model using Twitter data. We believe that our research can contribute to research on rumor theory and provide implications for public health officials or health care providers.